South Carolina is preparing to execute the third inmate to be put to death since September as the state goes through a backlog of prisoners who exhausted their appeals while the state couldn’t find lethal injection drugs.

The state executed Bowman for the 2001 murder of 21-year-old Kandee Martin, a young mother who was killed five days before her son's second birthday.

South Carolina's Marion Bowman Jr. is set to be the first person executed this year on Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear his case.